arXiv:2506.05529cs.AIcs.LG2025-06

用生物恐惧机制启发神经网络,让智能体学会主动避开死亡状态。

Avoiding Death through Fear Intrinsic Conditioning

  • 基于杏仁核发育原理设计内在奖励机制,通过记忆增强网络实现。
  • 在部分可观测环境中成功避免死亡状态,行为类似动物的恐惧条件反射。
  • 可调节恐惧阈值生成类焦虑行为,适用于研究情绪相关强化学习。

生物与心理概念启发了强化学习算法,催生出目标分解、课程学习和内在奖励等技术,拓展了智能体的行为能力。然而,评估这些方法常依赖人工设计的外部奖励,在真实环境中难以实现。关键挑战在于:某些状态(如死亡)具有高负奖励但不提供反馈。本文受早期杏仁核发育启发,提出一种新型记忆增强神经网络(MANN)架构,构建内在奖励函数。该机制能有效抑制智能体对终止状态的探索,产生类似动物恐惧条件反射的回避行为。进一步实验表明,调节恐惧响应阈值可生成一系列类广泛性焦虑障碍(GAD)的行为模式。我们在Miniworld Sidewalk环境中验证了该方法,该环境为部分可观测马尔可夫决策过程(POMDP),具有稀疏奖励与非描述性的终止条件(即死亡)。结果表明,该生物启发框架能有效驱动智能体在无明确反馈的终止状态下实现规避行为。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Biological and psychological concepts have inspired reinforcement learning algorithms to create new complex behaviors that expand agents' capacity. These behaviors can be seen in the rise of techniques like goal decomposition, curriculum, and intrinsic rewards, which have paved the way for these complex behaviors. One limitation in evaluating these methods is the requirement for engineered extrinsic for realistic environments. A central challenge in engineering the necessary reward function(s) comes from these environments containing states that carry high negative rewards, but provide no feedback to the agent. Death is one such stimuli that fails to provide direct feedback to the agent. In this work, we introduce an intrinsic reward function inspired by early amygdala development and produce this intrinsic reward through a novel memory-augmented neural network (MANN) architecture. We show how this intrinsic motivation serves to deter exploration of terminal states and results in avoidance behavior similar to fear conditioning observed in animals. Furthermore, we demonstrate how modifying a threshold where the fear response is active produces a range of behaviors that are described under the paradigm of general anxiety disorders (GADs). We demonstrate this behavior in the Miniworld Sidewalk environment, which provides a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and a sparse reward with a non-descriptive terminal condition, i.e., death. In effect, this study results in a biologically-inspired neural architecture and framework for fear conditioning paradigms; we empirically demonstrate avoidance behavior in a constructed agent that is able to solve environments with non-descriptive terminal conditions.

强化学习恐惧机制生物启发避险行为

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